According to Educause’s 2016 edition of its annual Top 10 IT Issues report^*, optimizing educational technology is a top concern for campus IT this year — only information security ranked higher. Campus print technologies that capture information from paper-based content and share it throughout your institution like electronic or digital documents are integral to optimizing your classroom technology for modern higher education experiences.

As today’s campuses become more collaboration-focused, seamless document sharing is increasingly important to students. In fact, 86 percent^** of students report that technology helps them be more effective, efficient learners.

Technology is central to making workflows smooth and efficient, including sharing information to and from learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard™ Learn and Canvas, or from personal storage, such as DropBox, Office 365, Google Drive, and other document repositories. Today, institutions are looking to empower students and faculty along this efficient and effective route to digitize and share documents from a variety of endpoints, whether it’s via a smartphone, cloud storage or anywhere else.

As a result of the dichotomy between paper and digital content, your college or university is challenged to make class workflows between paper and digital documents simple and seamless. Benefits might include, for example, allowing students who prefer to take notes by hand to keep up on classwork with their laptop or tablet-toting peers — or enabling a professor who wants to print out the day’s essays from her or his learning management system to review them on the train ride home without taking many extra steps that can hamper productivity and cause frustration.

Even when you succeed at transforming paper/digital document workflows, your millennial students and most of your faculty would expect your institution’s evolution to information mobility to “just work” 24/7, without downtime or delays. From their point of view, after all, the purpose of these advanced campus print technologies is to make their learning experience easier and better than at higher education institutions burdened by low-tech, 100% paper-based approaches.

So as your college or university looks to drive seamless, anytime collaboration with the latest campus print technology, in the course of your research, be sure to look for a solution that not only provides an easy-to-use and effective path to document sharing and collaboration, but also one that can be relied upon to provide students and faculty with the 24/7 access they expect from today’s advanced information technologies.

Elisa Esposito is Senior Manager, Channel Marketing, Higher Education for Ricoh USA, Inc., responsible for vertical marketing strategy, development and success to ensure strategic alignment for higher education customer environments. Esposito has worked with Ricoh’s strategic partner, Blackboard, to create the industry’s first scanning and printing connector that unites information from a Ricoh multifunction device to integrate within Blackboard Learn.